The French coastal city was home to the infamous makeshift village of migrants seeking to cross to the UK. The ‘Jungle’ was dismantled less than a year ago, but immigrants are now back in town.
Author: Worldcrunch
The U.S. president’s threat to ‘totally destroy’ a nation is beyond the pale. But is there method to it?
-OpEd- TURIN — Everyone knew that Australian politician Rachel Carling-Jenkins had filed for a divorce, but nobody knew why. She explained it herself, a few days ago, standing up to speak before the state parliament of Victoria, of which she is a member. In February 2016 she had found images on her husband’s computer of […]
Libération, Sept. 19, 2017 Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday broke her silence on the violence in her Buddhist-majority country that has forced hundreds of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. French newspaper Libération featured a picture of her with the headline “A Nobel and a massacre” splashed on […]
-Analysis- The blueprints of the Middle Ages are back. Even as metal and glass have long since replaced stone and mortar, there is an unmistakable parallel to be drawn between medieval fortifications and the walls rising in all corners of the world: from the U.S.-Mexico border to Hungary, from São Paulo to the West Bank. […]
The PLO gives monthly allowances to the families of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails. The Israeli and U.S. governments want the practice to stop.
-Analysis- SAO PAULO — The idea of economic planning dominated the imagination of 20th-century economists. Unlike the classical liberal view, the planning concept supports clear government intervention in the spontaneous course of markets. By implementing one plan or another, the theory goes, governments can speed up a process or correct a wrong course. Plans are […]
There is no contradiction between feeling French (or Catalan, or Berliner) and becoming a European citizen. But it is time for that citizenship to have real civic meaning.
WASHINGTON — This month, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will open for signature at the United Nations. Signatories will promise never to “develop, test, produce, manufacture . . . possess or stockpile nuclear weapons’; never to transfer weapons to other parties nor to receive them; and never to “use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.” The treaty’s aims, if they could be universally effected, are noble. After all, the prospect of nations — including, now, an international pariah like North Korea — facing off with their respective nuclear arsenals is horrific. Their renewed use in war would […]
TEKNAF — They ran, they walked, they stumbled, then they ran again. They’re exhausted, starving, some are wounded. They fled with fear and death chasing from behind. They are also carrying with them the memory of those who have died and an endless list of the missing. There is, in the forced exodus of Myanmar’s […]
Writers, artists, journalists and others fleeing oppression in Turkey are settling in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. But the dream is always to go back home.
The restaurant ‘Garemt Akl’ (eating crime) aims to tap into Hunger Games morbidity and real-life curiosity about incarceration among Egyptians. But it is chillingly insensitive to real inmates and their families.
RECIFE — Caricatures can sometimes cross the line. But world leaders, who are always the center of attention, tend to get used to unflattering satirical portraits. But two former Brazilian Presidents embroiled in corruption scandals, Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, have become targets of a different — literal — sort. As daily Folha de […]
Millions of British citizens don’t want to give up being European.
BENGALURU — In vintage crime novels, there is often someone murdered by slow poisoning, and arsenic has been a common weapon of choice. It works the same way in your body — slowly killing you — if it is present in the water you drink beyond a certain threshold. This is why it’s disturbing that, according to a new study, the groundwater along the densely populated Indus river basin in Pakistan is severely contaminated with arsenic, putting the health of over 50 million people at risk. Arsenic occurs naturally in Earth’s crust. It is used by humans in some alloys […]
-Analysis- The honeymoon is definitely over. Just four months after he was elected to lead France, Emmanuel Macron faced his first major nationwide protest Tuesday against major labor reform plans that are seen as the central pillar of his presidency. Tens of thousands of workers have gone on strike for the day, causing some travel […]
In May 1999, I visited North Korea. I was based at the time in Beijing as a correspondent for a Slovenian newspaper, and it was impossible not to visit the country that had aroused so many questions and offered so few answers. One just needed to see the place. So I did. I joined a […]
-Analysis- MOSCOW — Aug. 9 came and went in Russia without an official celebration. And yet, the date is significant. It marks the moment Vladimir Putin first came to power — 18 years ago. Everyone, from his closest advisors at the Kremlin to independent political scientists, expects the Russian president to continue to heed his […]
-OpEd- PARIS — Can a leather ball turn into a bubble? After the extravagant sums of money spent by French soccer team Paris Saint-German to sign Brazilian star Neymar Jr, as well as other splurges by British, Spanish and Italian teams this summer, there’s no avoiding the question: Has soccer become a speculative bubble? The […]
The origins of this particularly powerful Caribbean storm can be traced back to an El Nino no-show.
The answer from Chinese professionals may surprise you…
The absence of Christian players at the professional level can be traced to discrimination that begins young.
Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall has been a rallying cry and all-purpose metaphor since his improbable campaign began in 2015. But if and when it gets built, the wall would also be, well, a wall. The U.S. president’s decision Tuesday to let the so-called DACA program expire is aimed at pushing Congress to find a […]
WASHINGTON — President Trump is hurtling toward a crossroads on immigration — his signature campaign issue and a key source of his law-and-order reputation — where each path before him comes with significant political risks. Trump has temporarily placed the fates of roughly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children in the hands of Congress, buying himself time and shunting responsibility. Should Congress act, the president will have to choose whether to sign on to a legislative solution granting the “dreamers’ legal status — or to let the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, […]
-Analysis- BENGALURU — The patient was the Indian economy. Among the 176 countries that have been ranked by Transparency International on a scale from 100 (very clean) to zero (highly corrupt), India ranks in the second half of the list at 79, with illegal money of sizeable proportions. The central government, which was elected on the promise of a cleaner government, is worried about coming to power again. With the impending election two years away, it had to do something drastic: a much-dreaded surgery with uncertain consequences. That was the November 2016 decision of removing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 […]
The West is in relative decline, especially compared to Asia, but no obvious alternative ‘system’ has emerged.
North Korea may now be too dangerous to be attacked. But that may force all to find a diplomatic solution.
Some 31,000 Syrians have returned to their war-torn country from abroad this year and many are struggling to survive in a country they call home.
Erkan Emre’s occasional cravings for Berlin-style döner kebabs led to an unexpected career shift, and proved to be a recipe for success.
Pope Francis is not afraid of speaking freely, with his sermons and writings — and a fair share of press interviews — stirring up the Catholic establishment since his election in 2013. Yet a new book based on transcripts of 12 separate conversations with a French sociologist is particularly rich in revelations. The 432-page Politique […]
A vital source of agricultural crops, fish and shrimp, the Mekong Delta is Vietnam’s most fertile area. But it’s also the most fragile.
PARIS — What becomes of psychoanalysis in our hyper-connected digital world? The question is ripe, as new technologies capture the psyche and absorb the libido of each and every one of us. As relations among individuals are now broadcast to everyone, your relationship with yourself is fundamentally altered. This changes the status of speech and […]
From zoning laws and insurance polices to the realities of climate change, there are ways to prevent such widespread suffering. But it requires political will.
-Analysis- Do GIFs have a place in serious publications? Where the hell is my giraffe emoji? Do androids dream of electric sheep? The digital world is presenting us with questions we never could have imagined we’d have to answer — and maybe we don’t. But there are also those brand new mind-boggling questions of a […]
What connects the violence in Barcelona and Charlottesville? Where have Western democracies gone wrong since the turn of the century?
João Lourenço succeeds José Eduardo Dos Santos, who ruled with an iron fist since 1979. But Dos Santos has been busy keeping his hands on the levers of power.
-Analysis- It was the “Fight of the Century.” Or was it? As far as fighting goes, Saturday night’s $700-million mega-bout between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor — also humbly dubbed “The Biggest Fight In Combat Sports History” (capital letters matter) — was actually a tad more entertaining than Mayweather’s 2015 “Fight of the Century” against […]
AQAP, the local al-Qaeda branch, is determined to learn from its mistakes. They’ve learned that they can’t go too quickly and spill too much local blood.
Millions drive past the favela of Vila Esperança, with its rampant unemployment and open sewers. But thanks to a three-meter high concrete wall, they don’t see it.
OGONI REGION — Stanley, 40, once considered becoming a fighter. He says he already has a small stash of Kalashnikov assault rifles hidden somewhere. He’s not boasting. That’s just how things are in the creeks of the Niger Delta. The youth have easier access to weapons than to schools and jobs. But instead of becoming […]